Funny Weather

Critics Review

• A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art

  Telegraph

• Olivia Laing is my new favourite non-fiction writer

  Nick Hornby

• Like all great critics, Olivia Laing combines formidable intelligence with boundless curiosity and fabulous taste, but she also has a rare quality of intimacy; an ability to connect the reader to a work of art or literature with a directness that lights it up like nothing else. It’s why I read her

  James Lasdun

• A warm, thinking, enticing sweep of a book, like spending the afternoon with your brainiest friend

  Kate Mosse, author of The Burning Chambers

• Her observations and poetic incisiveness on art, writers and politics are a gift. This is a fascinating, excursive, tonic of a book

  Sinead Gleeson, author of Constellations

• A thought-provoking, inspiring collection that you can go back to whenever the weather takes a funny turn

  Evening Standard

• Funny Weather gives the reader a tangible sense of the sprawling garden of work which Laing has planted. She is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature: a worthy guide with both a macro and micro vision, fluent in her chosen tongue and always full of empathy and awe

  Irish Times

• Laing has acted as a kind of cultural sage for the past four years, an accidental literary grande dame of the emotional havoc wrought by late capitalism and digital disconnect

  New York Magazine

• Olivia Laing combines passion and curiosity in a collection of art-based essays and profiles that reflect the uncertainty of our age

  Observer

• The hospitality of world view in Olivia’s writing is a vital force in our disputatious present

  Maria Balshaw, director of Tate

• Never has a publication been more timely

  Dazed

• A fine writer’s embrace of the artists who preceded her, friendly visits with their lives and loving acknowledgement of their foundational contributions. A work of joy in recognition

  Sarah Schulman

• The book to help you make sense of the world . . . [a] mesmerizing collection of essays . . . this unique and compassionate book is a mind-expanding opportunity to rethink how we live, and what we can do to change things for the better.

  Stylist

• A light-footed tour of enriching stories, lives, and ideas

  Dazed and Confused

• Her gift as a critic is her ability to imaginatively sympathize with her subjects in a way that allows the art and life of the artist to go on radiating meaning after the book is closed

  Elle

• Breathtaking, beautiful, funny, shocking, sad, revealing, and timely

  Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina

• I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love; they’re the essence of great 21st century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, wilful and wonderfully unbound.

  Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

• Olivia Laing shines the light for art writing. Funny Weather urges us to humanise art, and listen to what artists say about life, love and crisis.

  Charlie Porter

• An incivisive meditation on the value of heartfelt, messy art in our paranoid times

  Telegraph

• …leavened by empathy and an omnivorous curiosity

  Guardian

• It’s not just art we need in an emergency, but writers, like Laing, who gently guide our eyes to what’s out there

  Observer

• Vibrant commentary on art and society by a writer with a sharp eye for the offbeat

  Kirkus

• Laing’s essays are urgent, compassionate, enlivening and acutely perceptive, and that’s true whether or not we encounter them “in an emergency”

  the arts desk

• Her words seem balefully accurate, given what has now overtaken us

  Financial Times

• Laing is an intelligent and acute writer, and this book is certainly interesting and assuredly well-written

  Scotsman